New “Corona de Aragón” archive

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This new building is located in the area where attempts have been made since the early 80s to recover the Cerdà grill: for streets to smoothly pass by, a difficult aspect given the railway lines and slope that had formed over the years between the established Eixample area and the land and beaches lying further to the south east. It was a specific urban characteristic that had created historical anomalies such as Marina bridge, which seemed to be a bridge no river. On a buttress of this bridge, we anchored our building, limited to the rather meagre triangular plot the City Council had assigned but which faced the magnificent park of Estació del Nort, where Beverly Pepper intervened at the time. We decided to divide the building into two bodies: we placed the heaviest beyond the metro easement and it had four floor for storing documents; the public information and technical service body we placed in the corner of the block as an element that expresses the profound structure of the Cerdà grill. There we located the access through the transparent hall to the inner courtyard of the block, situated on the lower level. This effect gave peculiar lighting to the archive, an urban presence of great spatial complexity.